Why is that a limitation? It’s only a problem if you’re planning to make something for the general public. If you’re doing it to learn Japanese, stuff based on your own personal experience is better.
I have a bunch of custom-mnemonics that are really weak but they were the first thing that popped into my head when I learned the item so they stick. Like 人数 is にん because you can’t drink gin at the zoo (because there’s such a large number of people, I guess).
Meaning mnemonics are almost invariably derived from the kanji’s radicals. Because of this, recognizing what radicals make up a kanji is enough to let you rebuild the mnemonic effortlessly. My current problem is that, in stark contrast, a lot of times pronounciation mnemonics are completely disconnected from the kanji.
If the kanji itself doesn’t act as a hint for the mnemonic, then memorizing the mnemonic is not any more efficient than just memorizing the pronounciation. Sadly, lately I’ve been seeing more and more occurrences of this.
A recent example is 秒 (Second, びょう). The meaning mnemonic is adequate but how am I supposed to divine “It only takes a second for your body odor to appear” outside of brute memory, at which point it would be easier to just remember びょう to begin with? When I am sitting looking at the kanji, the only hints I have are “grain”, “few” and “second”, and none of those elements are used in this mnemonic.
The mnemonic I have concocted in its place is: “There may only be a few grains, but at least you know they’re high quality because they’re BIOlogical,” which is a lot easier to remember, which is the point of mnemonics to begin with.
That’s a very good point! I remember I struggled with this one at the very beginning, but later like with some others I just brute-forced it into my memory. At that point it was also one of the few kanji with the reading びょう so that made it easier.
Lmao, this stuff’s the reason why I sometimes use Kanji Damage mnemonics, you’ll get plenty of those there. Just the idea of linking together minute and body odor is hilarious to me.
I already knew many of the kanji and readings from DuoLingo and reading, so I had my own mnemonics, which I add into the notes. But I often scan WK’s to see whether there is “anything good”. As time goes by, and my meaning/reading recall fades…I stare at those radicals more and more, waiting for the answer to tumble out of my brain. So I still think mnemonics help A TON in my car.
One of the most surprisingly influential books I ever read was “The Memory Book” by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas (the only book written by a professional magician and a professional basketball player that I am aware of!). “How to Develop a Super-Power Memory” by Harry Lorayne is probably better known. There are also regular memory competitions and many “memory athletes” have publically discussed their techniques.
Memory techniques were standard curriculum centuries ago (before various recording media were invented) but it’s pretty much unheard of now, so people don’t realize just what the human brain is capable of.
Champion memory athletes regularly memorize hundreds of random digits, multiple shuffled decks of cards, hundreds of historical facts, an entire auditorium of peoples names, entire phone books (remember them?), or even entire city skylines in just a few minutes. It’s truly shocking the first time you see it done.
Mnemonics are intended to build associations in your brain, in particular for short-term memory.
More specific to Kanji and WK, you’ll depend on mnemonics less and less as you move items through the stages, likely not depending on them at all when you “burn” an item: by that time, you’ve built a long-term association in your memory and don’t need to rely on “tricks.”
Both memory books and pretty much all the memory athletes agree on what makes a good mnemonic association: something VISUAL that is as exaggerated, absurd, grotesque, embarrassing, or sexual as possible. The best associations are deeply personal, often impossible to explain to others, and almost always too embarrassing to explain even if you could!
Here’s a pretty good treatise on the subject of memory associations.
The WK-provided mnemonics can never be as good as the ones you create yourself, but, despite all the grumbling I read on this forum about the “silly” default mnemonics that WK created, I think they’ve done an amazingly good job.
It takes time and effort to create decent mnemonics, and the defaults that WK provides are usually good enough to jump-start the process. I appreciate not having to even expend the effort to create a mnemonic for every single item here.
I’ll usually start with the WK-provided mnemonic (because I’m lazy) but if I find I keep missing reviews for an item, then I’ll take the time to create my own.
As the article I linked to above points out, the absolute worst thing you can do is to create mnemonics that are logical, reasonable, and boring!
Something very funny about seeing some of the mnemonics that have stuck immediately for me (the kyuucumber research and the BO that appears in just a second) called out specifically as ones that are hard to remember
I agree with the statement that mnemonics should be strongly evocative to be truly effective, because I’ve tried several times to add mnemonics which would be “better” than the ones WaniKani provides, but usually failed in the process, save for a few exceptions like 里.
The reason I don’t like many of the WK mnemonics is because per my experience very often the middle of the mnemonic story quickly fades out from my memory and I’m left with half-guessing the reading and then realizing that the reading is somehow connected to a part of the mnemonic story, but the rest is already missing. I often see this for verbs, which do require additional reinforcement, because they use longer kun’yomi readings. For instance, 認める. I remember the mnemonic mentioned “meat”, but I can’t recall anymore how exactly meat is related to “recognizing” anything.
Shorter mnemonic stories like the one for 担う work for me. Ones that completely distort the pronunciation of an English word or phrase to fit, don’t, however.
It’s hard to create good mnemonics for yourself. It’s much, much harder to create good mnemonics that work for someone else. It’s darn close to impossible to create a good mnemonic that works for everyone, IMO. Try to keep it politically correct and you’ve really got a challenge. I try to cut WK a lot of slack.
Fortunately, WK lets you create your own mnemonics (whether you bother to write them into the boxes or not). Like any other skill, you get better with practice.
The WK provided mnemonics that bug me usually involve their insistence on always using “moon” for つきへん (月).
The Japanese distinguish between つきへん and にくづきへん, even though the written appearance of the radical is exactly the same.
At least half of the kanji with that radical make a million times more sense when you realize it’s the “flesh,” or “body” interpretation of the radical rather than “moon”!
脳 means “brain,” a part of the body. I think of a water-filled box that’s part of the body. WK provides this tortuous meaning mnemonic: “Nestled in the light of the moon in the grass is a treasure chest that you can see with your brain. You close your eyes, and you can see the spot, but it’s kept deep in your brain, and you have to use its power to find it.”
肺 means “lungs,” a part of the body. The body radical gives me a hint, and it even looks like two lungs below the arms and on either side of the spine! WK gives us: “There is a moon and a city inside your lung. Inside of your lung there is a city and above that city lies a moon. It’s a pretty sight, but also very strange. Moons and cities don’t usually reside inside lungs.” Really?! All that effort to come up with a story involving a moon when it’s so simple if you think of it as “body”?
Here is my valuable contribution.
And I think I honestly should as well. Thank you 
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I think Sean or Leebo mentioned something similar about the 月 radical often meaning “body” in kanji in another thread when I tried to claim (and failed, of course) that because some radicals are mislabeled in WaniKani, it kind of takes away the possibility to get a more native look at the characters. Which to some extent it seems might be true, because if “body” was brought up for the body-related kanji as a radical, one wouldn’t have to do mental gymnastics with the existing radicals .
I’m personally more bothered with the meanings of specific kanji being a little incomplete or misleading and later that confusion is being propagated into vocab items which use them. For instance, 苛 means both “frustration” when directed towards self, but also “torment”. However, the only provided meaning is “frustration” and that meaning is used to explain 苛める, while it would’ve been significantly easier to add “torment” to the kanji and use that as an explanation. The emotions behind the 苛 kanji don’t change, well, other than 苛める then clearly being directed towards another.
Another one is 台 which for me was one of the triggers to start investigating the meanings behind kanji and how they’re used more. In WaniKani it means “machine”, but the only connection to machines is the fact that it’s used as a counter for machines and vehicles. If one takes the meaning of “pedestal”, it’s a lot easier to explain some of the vocab items, like 舞台. And that knowledge is then useful outside of WaniKani.
I would give you a Michelin star if I could, but I can only offer a single like 
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I feel like there’s a certain point where you shift from relying on mnemonics primarily to relying on mnemonics as a backup
Currently I rarely use the mnemonics as the kanji themselves usually contain some character that I already know that points towards the pronunciation - it’s only when it’s super different to anything I’ve seen before do I use the mnemonics
That being said I don’t think any of them are terribly awful - I feel reassured in fact that there are at least some mnemonics that I can turn to when I struggle to remember certain characters. I’m also fairly certain that WK is aware that not all of their mnemonics work for everyone - the mnemonic for 式 encourages you to create your own one
I’m sure it’s different in the earlier levels - at these stages creating good mnemonics is vital - but the further you progress into WK the less you rely on the mnemonics and the more you use your past experience
I think this is the key. Considering the fact that many of the previous posts disagree about what’s problematic, I think that, barring some minor improvements, the mnemonics are good enough for what they set out to do.
I understand the irritation. I’m constantly amazed at how imprecise the English translations are, much less the Japanese words and kanji!
I think WK would be incredibly dull and far less helpful if they took the time to explain all the nuance behind every kanji and vocabulary item, but sometimes the imprecision does become a bit annoying. It’s often said (correctly) that polite Japanese is incredibly indirect and nuanced, but I’m constantly amazed how often the English translation is technically correct but easily misunderstood.
Today, I saw they translated 降る (ふる) as “to fall”. Well, yes, but only in the sense that rain or snow falls from the sky. You wouldn’t use it if you tripped on a banana peel or knocked something off a shelf.
Does “row” mean using an oar or a line of objects? How many people here think 議会 has something to do with losing weight? Is “break” a verb or a noun? Does it mean a rest? To make something inoperable? To separate? To interrupt? Those are all different words in Japanese.
Anyway, as has often been said: WK is here only and specifically to help you learn Kanji which is just one step toward learning the Japanese language. There are many more steps: production vs. recall, grammar, speaking/pronunciation, listening, vocabulary, etc.
For me, nothing comes close to WK for this specific task, and I think it would suffer greatly if they tried to do more. There’s always room for improvement with anything (this thread understandably gives the stink-eye to some of the mnemonics) but overall I’m incredibly impressed with what they’ve accomplished with this system.
From what I understand, after a certain level you get to the point where seeing the semantics of the kanji itself should help to realize which radical within the kanji is phonetic and helps to guess, and therefore understand, the reading of a kanji. To a certain point, I guess. Im still at level 3, but I heard that at about level 20/30 mnemonics become useless because of this. If I ever struggle on a reading I try to understand why it is that way and sometimes look up grammar on it, among other things.
I think you might have misunderstood what someone was trying to say. Mnemonics will always be helpful for brand new items in “Apprentice 1” that you’ve just recently seen for the first time. Your brain needs something to hang onto (unless you already knew the word), and the mnemonics (your own or provided) help quite a bit.
After multiple reviews, however, you’ll rely on the mnemonic less and less. By the time you burn an item you should just instantly recognize it without any conscious effort. Most of the time it will take many, many reviews before you get to this point, even though the SRS automatically spaces out the reviews to optimize the process. Note that even without a single mistake, it still takes months and many, many reviews to “burn” an item.
You will also get much better at guessing the reading of newly introduced kanji (or forgotten ones that come up in a review). It’s quite common to know how to pronounce a character but not know the meaning (sometimes even though you know some of a vocabulary word that uses the kanji). Even then, you often only know one reading but not the others. The great thing about the WK SRS is that you just don’t have to think too much: if you know it, great, if not, a miss just means you’ll see it again sooner.
It’s never a mistake to do more research on a word that interests you. Just don’t let it prevent you from doing your reviews!
The Keisei script is super useful but needs to also tell you what the semantic component means - I just learned from this thread that 月 can mean flesh instead of moon/month as a semantic component
In general I think that WK would be better if it would allow kanji to be made of other kanji (which they are) instead of wasting time learning the same kanji as a radical for the sake of their system - especially so when you learn radicals that are literally just smushed kanji such as the “leader” “tsunami” “fingers” etc. I think radicals should only be the things that aren’t standalone kanji (only 10 out of the 26 lvl 1 radicals are necessary imo). So upon starting a level you’d immediately have access to kanji that are themselves radicals such as 女 人 日 etc
Interesting! I’ll have to try it. Thanks for the hint.
Well, for what it’s worth, using radicals isn’t really “their” system. The Japanese themselves also use 部首 to teach kanji (not to mention the Chinese!).
While all of the radicals certainly derived from other kanji, I don’t think it’s exactly correct to think of 部首 as 漢字. The difference between つきへん and にくづきへん is just one example.
It’s not just one radical with two meanings. It goes the other way, too: Two very common radicals are called にすいへん and さんずいへん in Japanese, but “ice” and “tsunami” here on WK (I would prefer “water” for the latter, but that’s a nit). Both derive from the kanji for water (水 — a four stroke character, by the way) but they are definitely different radicals and the two-stroke version definitely implies ice/cold/cool. The WK definitions are arguably “better.”
I find it helpful to know what names the Japanese use for 部首 (mostly so I can pester my Japanese wife with questions). This article on radicals proved invaluable to me. I think you might find it useful as well.
Tx all for your replies, will read carefully and reply in-between my meetings today
Hi Pizh,
Do you mean that you initially learn the kanji/vocab by rote memorization, then use the SRS system to get it in your memory, and only for the ‘difficult’ items (the ones you fail more often, etc.) you would look at the mnemonic ? In that case, do you use the original one from WK or create yours ?
I’m just trying to rephrase in my own words to see if I understood correctly, sorry if I misinterpreted !